A Brooklyn Writer Talks About Gowanus' Empty Vessel Project

We were wandering around and found this really wonderful blog entry about the Empty Vessel Project on the Gowanus Canal. If you know Gowanus, you probably know the Empty Vessel Project, a World War II rescue boat that is moored at the foot of First Street and serves as a community and performance space. Recently, it has been threatened with having to move. The boat is still there, but we haven't heard from the good people that run EVP in a few weeks. We also noted that an Open House New York event scheduled for the boat was cancelled.

In any case, the item was posted on a new blog called LiteraDog, which is produced by writer Amy Holman, who is now a Gowanus resident:

At the end of June when I had not yet found a new apartment for my ancient dog and me to inhabit and was still living in the Smith Street apartment with the gutted bathroom owned by blase slumlords, I gave a poetry reading on a World War II rescue boat to the best audience ever. There it is, left, on a sunny day in July on the Gowanus Canal and 1st Street. I was standing on the Carroll Street bridge--the oldest retractile bridge in the country--to take this photo of The Empty Vessel Project, a new community arts organization. Empty because it has no engine, certainly not because it has no community. Not a single person in my audience that night--it was also the audience of another poet and two singer/songwriters--lived in Carroll Gardens or anywhere close. I'm guessing thirty people. This is significant to the poets out there reading in bars and cafes and bookstores to imaginary throngs. It was a warm, engaged audience. There was vodka of every infusion available for a few bucks, and there was the after-party at a bar that used to be a mafia social club. I was recommended to the curators, Chris and Sean, by my friend, Elena Alexander, who had read her poetry two weeks before. The other poet/raconteur had a day job driving The Circle Line, as did a fiction writing audience member. That's how you get an audience for a poetry reading on a boat. I thought it would be my swan song to the neighborhood but the very next week I found the studio with big kitchen a few blocks away from the empty vessel. A lark, not a swan.

So, it looks like it is still there at 1st Street and the Canal, but actually, it's been moved to private property. Empty Vessel Project needs new docking space on the Gowanus or in Red Hook. I think it should stay on the Gowanus, especially near where it was, next to that Silo with the artist studios. The vessel is now being used as an art studio for Bara Diokhane, a painter from Senegal, who is working on a project that makes connection to the boat people who leave Senegal because of economic opportunities in Spain. This residency is through a partnership with Free Dimensional.

Get yourself over to the web site, at least, and the boat, at best. Be sure to include vessel when you type in the web address, or else you will reach a Christian Mission targeting teens with rock & roll. But here is the boat: www.emptyvesselproject.org.

Related Post:

Historic Gowanus Boat Seeks Friend With Connections